


All Manner of Wolves

by montparnasse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-10
Updated: 2014-06-10
Packaged: 2018-02-04 04:51:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1766137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A first kiss and a piece of forever.</p><p>Or, in which life is not a Brontë novel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Manner of Wolves

There’s something to be said for a working knowledge of science when it comes to dealing with Sirius Black. Remus knows this. Remus has known this since second year, when he learned the brittle bark of his laugh and taught himself to diagnose the cut of his jaw, the tense strain of his shoulders, and set himself against seventy-three kilos of wild-eyed human hurricane. Five years and he makes a remarkable weathervane:  Remus knows just how to handle sunshine and summer storms, whether to ride them out or show the sun his aching bones.

This one, though. This is a new one.

“I thought you were going to work on your Transfiguration essay,” Remus says mildly, ignoring for the moment the utter wrongness, the sheer honking, tap-dancing absurdity of Sirius Black doing any of his schoolwork before breakfast the morning it’s due. They’re sitting at the head of Remus’ bed in the empty dormitory, where Remus—who finished his own Transfiguration essay three days ago—is copying Rimbaud into his journal, and Sirius has been reading the same page of the same book for at least twenty minutes. The whole situation is making something squirm beneath his stomach:  Sirius, jittery and tense in the knees, pretending to be reading, entertaining thoughts of actually writing an essay before eight o’clock the day of. Madness. Lunacy.

And the strangest part is, unless Remus accidentally stole the wrong chocolate out of Peter’s dresser and this whole thing is a fever dream induced by something potent and extremely illegal, Sirius keeps shooting him surreptitious little glances that are only all the more obvious for their total lack of subtlety, and also the fact that they’re happening every twelve seconds.

So, yes. The stuff of squirmy large intestines.

“And I thought you were going to do a hornpipe naked on the front lawn with me, but that dream vanished like so much smoke in the Prefects’ bathroom,” Sirius says. He still hasn’t turned the page, and Remus fights the urge to unbuckle his belt and make sure there’s nothing crawling in intimate or unsavory places. “Don’t think I don’t know what you get up to in there, Lupin. I’ve heard the stories. Would curl a lad’s toes.”

“That was New Year’s and you were drunk.”

“Not _that_ drunk. And you weren’t at all and you promised.” He’s looking at Remus sideways with something that is either determination or indigestion jolting across his brow. Remus swallows. “Are you copying _poetry_?  You nance,” he says fondly, leaning over Remus’ writing.

Sirius' hair looks very soft for only being brushed roughly twice a week, and he smells like wet tree bark and wet dog and vaguely of blackberries. “You smell like jam,” Remus feels the need to tell him, feeling a little wave of heat break over his face.

“Is it on my face?” Sirius pushes his nose under Remus’ eye, and Remus waits for the great slobbery blackberry-tasting tongue that never actually comes out to lick his cheek like Sirius would normally do. It is the exceedingly strange glacé cherry on the exceedingly strange frosting on the exceedingly strange cake of this early spring day. Remus isn’t used to this, doesn’t normally have to guess at the shift of Sirius’ hands or the tight twist of his mouth, and the whole thing is throwing him off-kilter. He puts a hand on Sirius’ shoulder but doesn’t push him away.

“You’ve probably got a whole moldy jam-colony living on your face,” he mutters. Sirius smiles at him, a bright sunshine burst of summer and familiarity, and Remus grabs onto it like it’s a ballast.

“Will you cultivate my mold?” He presses into Remus’ cheek again, sharp nose, warm skin. “I never paid attention in Herbology.”

“You’re disgusting.” Remus stares over Sirius’ shoulder at his book, now closed, and wonders what a seventeen-year-old boy—an _actual_ seventeen-year-old boy, not a moth-eaten sweater vest in boy-skin—is supposed to do in this situation. He remembers that most mold is difficult and unmanageable at best, some of it highly toxic and some of it smelling like his parents’ basement and some of it, when mixed with eye of newt, puts boils in unspeakable places; his eyes flicker back to Sirius’, which is—strange. Definitely strange. Definitely too close. Definitely making something twinge near his liver, in that little place he tries very hard not to let Sirius touch.

“My God, you’re actually thinking about it, aren’t you,” Sirius says, looking happy and oddly soft around the edges. His breath is warm and sweet against Remus’ cheek. “You want to garden my moldy face.”

“You’re hopeless. You’re—you’re a lot of things.”

“I am,” Sirius tells him, nodding, thoughtful and sounding slightly dazed. “I am hopeless and you want to tend my mold.”

He’s looking at Remus like there’s some sort of hidden significance there, lying beneath their noses and the faint smell of blackberry like a hippogriff hiding in the wilds of Kent, only Remus can’t quite see it. “Um,” he says. One of Sirius’ hands is on his arm, a thumb stroking absently over his skin. Remus doesn’t shiver. Doesn’t. “Um.” They’re so close.

They’re so close.

When Sirius’ cheeks turn a shade of bubbly pink Remus can only imagine complements his own, he spends a few frantic seconds assessing its possible origins. Illness. Exhaustion. Too much breakfast. Too little breakfast. Stomach rupture. Firewhiskey before noon. Possibly he is about to put his tongue in Remus’ ear, or bellow something obscene about James and the Quidditch pitch, or maybe he’s going to stick his tongue in Remus’ _mouth_ , which would be—

“Moony.” His voice is ragged and raw and almost, almost what Remus imagined it would sound like, saying his name that way, only better, beautiful. “I—this is. Is this all right?”

“Are you,” Remus breathes, and stops, because Sirius’ eyes are brighter and darker than they’ve ever been, like a child’s, like they were when the world was wonder and life was all little things.

“Remus,” says Sirius, and, lower, “you know. You do.” It’s almost a growl.

“Gnnrfff,” Remus says, but then Sirius is kissing him, and Remus’ lungs shrivel up, and his mouth is _wet_ and there are teeth and he wonders, insanely, if this is what Jane felt like in the orchard with Mr. Rochester and pulls away, his mouth hanging open like it’s been unhinged. It is probably extremely unattractive but something inside him has just snapped and his brain can’t process words and his lips don’t have the decency to look like they belong on his face rather than in a meat grinder.

Sirius drops his arm and turns from him, looking wild and wicked and a little bit hurt beneath the quirk of his mouth. “You—could have—I mean, you might have _said_ ,” says Remus, his hands spread uselessly out in front of him.

“I’ve been saying so for ages, you absolute tosser.” Sirius tangles a hand in his hair and looks anywhere at all but Remus. “You’re the one who knows this stuff. You just—you always do.”

“You,” Remus tries, and fails. He licks his lips and tastes Sirius. “I’m not good at this,” he manages, “really, I’m no good at this sort of thing.”

“Well. Now you know.” Sirius is reaching for his book again and Remus’ mouth won’t work, his hands won’t work, his brain won’t work, all short-circuited and sloshing around in his skull like last year’s Christmas pudding. It’s worse than slugs in his jam. It’s worse than when he was partnered with Snape in Potions. He wants Sirius to look at him again or touch him or just _do_ something so he doesn’t have to spend all night analyzing what the thrill in his belly and the blood heating his temples mean, all rough and threading velvet-warm through his bones. “And now you’re _thinking_ about it!” Sirius shuts his book and shuffles off the bed, looking panicked and embarrassed and trying hard to hide something in the set of his jaw. “Let’s not, you know, I mean—essay, righto, I’ll just—”

The thing is, part of being so attuned to the sudden shifts and thunder-crashes of Sirius Black means Remus always reacts before he even knows what he’s doing; it means that when Sirius moves, Remus moves with him, same as he’s always done, and as soon as he’s on his feet Remus grabs him around the waist and pulls him backward, onto his bed, against him.

“Oh,” Sirius says. He goes very still. “We don’t—Moony. Remus. We don’t have to talk about it. Like the, like the wire wool and the fleas. Remember? Just like that, haha, no worries mate, we’ll just not talk about it or think about it or mention it. Ever. So. Um.”

Remus Lupin is not a man of action. Remus Lupin is a man who ponders, and scrutinizes, and makes lists, and then makes lists of the lists, and does his essays two weeks in advance. He dithers. He folds his socks. He consults encyclopedias and has tea with the Ancient Histories section.

But with Sirius, he realizes, he’s never actually needed to do that. Even the science of it, even the mercurial push-and-pull of their own gravity—it’s innate, inborn, a flesh-and-blood thing, a heat-and-melt thing, a Sirius-and-Remus thing. With Sirius, there’s just action and reaction, bodies in motion, bodies at rest, instinct grafted onto his skin like one of his scars. The shock of it, the sudden shrill glass explosion in his brain, pushes his face into the crook of Sirius’ neck and tightens his hold on his waist, and when he presses his mouth to his skin, he can feel Sirius’ heart beating on his lips, hot and wolf-wild.

“Remus?” The whisper reverberates in his chest, dissolves into his blood.

“Padfoot,” he says, “Sirius,” as he kisses the bump of his spine, “you stupid berk.”

All things considered, it’s nothing like Remus imagined his first kiss would be, on the rare occasions he has allowed himself to think of things like that at all. It’s usually been terribly romantic, very Austen, very grand-sweeping-cosmic-collision-of-eternal-love, very oh-Mr.-Rochester-my-heart-beats-only-for-you. There was no talk of mold and no taste of jam and no hair tickling his nose. It was usually under a streetlight, or in a sudden downpour with the smell of honeysuckle, or, maybe, in the Shrieking Shack late at night, with the scythe of the moon painting patchwork shadows between the bars. Sometimes, it’s been someone faceless, nameless; more often, it’s been Sirius because it’s _always_ been Sirius, because it’s always been Sirius in his head and his heart and even in those dreams he Does Not Think About Ever, especially not in the shower. It’s always been Sirius, because they are nothing if not these tiny orbits in the language of friendship, and love, and belonging, and desire. A hand on a shoulder. A safe bed at night. The smell of ink and chocolate and sun-drenched skin. The warm spill of laughter in a dark corridor.

And this, _this_ , Sirius turning in his arms and pushing him down on the bed—this is the logical conclusion. This is where they were always going. This is where they’ve always been.

“You tart,” Sirius growls, _God_ , right against his lips. “You might have _said_.”

“I already did,” Remus answers, and Sirius smiles like the sun. “You utter lunatic.”

“You,” Sirius says, and breathes, his fingers and palms warm and heavy on Remus’ collar, his neck, his jaw. “You, just—Remus,” he murmurs, and his mouth is on Remus’ mouth, his body is pushing against Remus’ body, all heat and softness and the sweet hard caress of skin on skin. He pulls his fingers through Sirius’ hair and moves against him, no split-second analysis, no control at all but for what they can make, and he feels Sirius gasp in his mouth.

“Sirius,” he whispers, the clever curl of his name honey-thick on his tongue, rhyming with everything, and it's easier than it’s ever been when Remus pulls him down again, and again, and flows into him, sure enough to flood them both clean through.


End file.
